I'm up way too late and have too much on my mind, so I kind of feel the need to weigh-in here (big-ups to illadelph for this thread, my brain needed this). I think that my ideas are similar to what Ginko was talking about, though I have never read Greene. I'm not 'religious' by any means and I do like Steven Hawking's ideas concerning parallelism etc., but I kind of have a problem with his disbelief in a superior being or higher consciousness and this is why...
Try to follow me and I'll do my best to explain clearly... what if the Universe and all its parallels ARE the supreme being?
This belief is called pantheism, as in All is God and God is All. Not all-powerful, and by no means moral, but indeed all-knowing because it is sum of its parts. Imagine everything (people, rocks, planets, stars, whatever) as a small droplets of water in an endless ocean of existence, divisible but amorphous as energy/matter cannot be created nor destroyed. Some might call this ocean God, some call it the Universe, but in this way we are all connected through a collective consciousness. For me, this is a good way to explain several historic mysteries as to how certain technologies simultaneously developed in eerily similar ways on opposite corners of the globe, for different groups of people who had no possible way of interacting with each other to share that information. Somewhere, somehow, those two strings of consciousness connected somewhere in a greater collectivity, a collectivity I believe to be both God and the Universe.
So the ocean-metaphor is a good place to start, but lets go a bit deeper into the wormhole (cue Morgan Freeman voice-over)... Imagine the structure of an atom: it has these electrons flying around it at light-speed, which is nuts because we've discovered that electrons can actually be in two places at once (they can be characterized as both a particle and a wave). Now imagine the structure of our universe, with it's billions and trillions of stars we see around us. Here's the trick though, when we see those stars, they exist for us in one space within our field of vision and understanding, but in the actual space where that light came from they may have already exploded millions of lightyears ago... Now, start with my ocean-metaphor and take it a bit deeper: imagine our Sun as an electron that is part of an atom of God. All the other stars are other electrons within the same atom, electron-lights that exist in space as both particle (how we understand them) and wave (how we see them). I do believe space as we know it could be finite, but only in the sense that we are confined within our own atom. This is where Hawking and his parallels agree with me nicely: parallel universes could just be other atoms that make up a larger cell, cells that are separate from us but at the same time interconnected to form a more complex being (God Him/Herself). Thinking of it this way, there could be billions and trillions (probably more but I don't wanna fuck with numbers that big cause it hurts my head) of cells required to complete this superior being... if it is even complete at all.
Now here's where I have trouble distinguishing infinite from finite: that same cellular/molecular continuum I just described above could also go IN REVERSE!!! As in, you could be the supreme being for all the trillions of little Universes present in the atoms of cells that make up your dick-tip and everything else that is you.
Like whoa bro... whoa
I acknowledge that none of this accounts for any sort of 'big bang' theory, which I'm not really sure I buy anyway; how the fuck does something just explode from nothing into existence...? What I've described above is sort of a synthesis, my own personal spin-off of my studies in college concerning Greek, Hindu, and Taoist philosophy/theology, combined with a bit of Jungian psychology (the collective consciousness part) and some basic cellular/atomic biology.
Phew, that felt like taking a giant intellectual shit: necessary, painful, but at the same time orgasmically satisfying...
Any thoughts...?
